Meteorites on Mars

Abstract

Four types of meteoritic material should be found on Mars: (1) micrometeorites, many of which will survive atmospheric entry unmelted, which should fall relatively uniformly over the planet's surface, (2) ablation products from larger meteorites which ablate, break up and burn up in the Mars atmosphere, (3) debris from large, crater forming objects, which, by analogy to terrestrial and lunar impact events, will be concentrated in the crater ejecta blankets (except for rare, large events, such as the proposed C-T event on earth, which can distribute debris on a planetary scale), and (4) debris from the early, intense bombardment, which, in many areas of the planet, may now be incorporated into rocks by geologic processes subsequent to the intense bombardment era. To estimate the extent of meteoritic addition to indigenous Martian material, the meteoritic flux on Mars must be known. It is estimated that the overall flux is twice that for the Moon and 1.33 that for Earth. For small particles, whose orbital evolution is dominated by Poynting Robertson drag, the flux at Mars can be estimated from the Earth flux. The smaller Martian gravitational enhancement as well as the decrease in the spatial density of interplanetary dust with increasing heliocentric distance should reduce the flux of small particles at Mars to about 0.33 times the flux at Earth. Because of the smaller planetary cross-section the total infalling mass at Mars is then estimated to be 0.09 time the infalling mass in the micrometeorite size range at Earth.